I grew up with the space program. My first firm memory about it was staying inside during fourth grade recess to listen to Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight on a nice day in May. Other standouts were the in-orbit rendezvous of the Gemini program, the Apollo 1 fire where I learned this really was a dangerous enterprise, Apollo 8 firing their thrusters on the other side of the moon in contact with no one. Earthrise. The Eagle has landed, and Walter Cronkite is speechless for the only time in his career.
That was the summer after my freshman year in college. Too busy to follow Apollo 13 in detail, but the LEM will keep them alive. Apollo 14 in person with friends from college. Apollo 17 with a professional geologist aboard, but Armstrong did a great job for an amateur. Realizing that the book Mom gave me, You Will Go To the Moon was wrong. And realizing that the government really had no good plans for what to do with the moon after we won the space race. How about that, Apollo wasn’t a science mission, it wasn’t even an engineering project, it was a political statement from the outset, even though it was hard and worth doing.
The Space Shuttle arriving, but not in time to save Skylab. Holding one of the protective tiles developed for the shuttle. Joining the impromptu welcome home gathering after Christa McAuliffe was chosen to be the first teacher in space. Seeing her not reach space. Seeing spots on Jupiter left by Comet Shoemaker-Levy. (Gene Shoemaker was supposed to be an astronaut. Some of his ashes did reach the moon and helped form a new crater.)
The Apollo 13 film. Wow, that was dicier than I thought. Enough things went right and the mission ended as well as it could.
“The space shuttle is late.” “It can’t be late, it’s a glider with lousy aerodynamics.” Oh dear, not again.
Meeting Dr. Harrison Schmitt at a Heartland climate change conference. Geologists are often good climate skeptics. They also know Earth has seen far worse than anything Anthropogenic Global Warming can bring. I didn’t ask about Al Gore equating skeptics with flat Earthers. BTW, Schmitt is a really nice guy and very down-to-earth. Sorry.
That’s not why I’m writing this. It’s almost the 50th anniversary and there are photos and other items ready to be used to remember a most precious day.
We’re going to be flooded over the next few days with Apollo 11 memorabilia, anecdotes, claims that we never should have gone there, claims that we should have gone back, and even claims that we never got there.
My addition to this cacophony is simple: Here are a few space-related sites that won’t get the attention I think they deserve.
By the Apollo 11 launch date, I had a very good idea of what would happen, and I wanted to hear it from the radio dialog between the Houston Space Center and the astronauts. I knew whatever network I had on, there would be a talking head in the studio to “help” explain it to the unprepared, so I suggested we watch CBS and Walter Cronkite, figuring that he was the least likely head to say something ridiculous at a key moment.
Experience the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing
A few years ago, I stumbled across Experience the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing and was completely blown away. It must have taken a huge amount of time to put together, but the site features an interactive animation that is better than the live coverage and describes the whole descent and landing with:
- Air-to-Ground: Audio on left channel, scrolling transcript on left side of animation. Yeah, “Air” isn’t quite right, however, the astronauts were breathing air, not space.
- Flight Director and controller audio on right channel, transcript on right.
- Indicators of who is speaking for both channels.
- Film in the middle. This is from a timelapse movie camera pointed out a window. This was not available live (obviously), but it’s a wonderful addition (obviously).
- Lunar module pitch angle simulation. If you ever played Lunar Lander on a DEC GT40, you pretty much learned this. (You likely have never heard of a GT40, that’s okay, it’s only 45 years old.)
- Timeline and bookmarks on the bottom.
If you start the animation, you will have trouble leaving it before the landing. It’s my favorite Apollo 11 web site by far.
Apollo 11 in Real Time
There was only one thing that could astound me more, and Apollo in Real Time did just that. Their animation covers the entire mission and more – from 20 hours before liftoff to President Nixon’s welcome on the USS Hornet 218 hours later. You will not finish this in one sitting! There are also many parts worth skipping, like deciding when to wake the astronauts during the return leg.
Their summary:
- All mission control film footage
- All TV transmissions and onboard film footage
- 2,000 photographs
- 11,000 hours of Mission Control audio
- 240 hours of space-to-ground audio
- All onboard recorder audio
- 15,000 searchable utterances
- Post-mission commentary
- Astromaterials sample data
Real time from Mars
This isn’t directly related to Apollo or manned space flight, but hey, it’s an example of space flight coverage without a talking head. And it’s a great thing to watch anyway.
Soon before the Curiosity rover reached Mars, I realized I should go off and learn something more about the mission, especially after hearing a radio story and interview with some of the designers. Apparently the landing was going to be more involved than the beach ball approach with Spirit and Opportunity, and they’re going to use a sky crane. Whoa. A what? I quickly found a wonderful description of the complex landing process titled 7 Minutes of Terror: The Challenges of Getting to Mars. It described a dozen or so steps involved in the landing, some easy, some challenging, some “you-must-be-crazy!” They pretty much all had to work right, and I resigned myself to expecting something would fail. How do you test a supersonic parachute in Mars-like conditions anyway?
Unlike the Apollo missions, the Curiosity mission controllers had no control over the landing process. By the time the controllers heard from Curiosity that it hit the atmosphere, the radio delay meant that Curiosity was on the ground. I found a live video feed that showed the ever increasing excitement as each step, big or small, happened perfectly as the probability of success climbed to 100% and the celebration erupts. JPL has learned that getting photos back ASAP is important, and they start coming in before the landing celebration ended. Well done!
On the other hand
The next few years will be the last hurrah (I hope) for the moon landing hoax supporters. I’m not an expert on any aspect of the matter, but I’ve heard only one claim that I couldn’t instantly refute. In the comments, I’ll tolerate one question/claim for each topic. I’ll tolerate a reply from me and one better one. Expect all else to simply get deleted and go swimming with the chemtrails, so save your text on your own system. Comments (especially deleted ones) might get preserved on a personal web page, people who complain may get Email from me, and replies may go on that web page too.
So make it good. As in, if you’re bent out of shape over the lack of stars in the moon photos, include proof that you photograph stars successfully.
Here’s a better idea
Pretty much every post-mission press conference starts out with the astronauts thanking all the thousands of people who worked out of the spot light to make the mission a success. I’m sure the WUWT community has anecdotes, relatives, friends, and other contacts with these unsung heroes. Let’s hear their stories, both the good ones and post-Apollo stories like turbo-pump designers who found that there just isn’t much demand for people who can drain a swimming pool in seconds.
Just for Fun
Finally, inspiration takes many odd paths. One of them led Randall Munroe, author of xkcd.com, to describe the moon landing launch vehicle (i.e. Saturn V to command module escape tower) using a blueprint and only the most common 1,000 words. Saturn, V, rocket, stage, oxygen, NASA, and thousand are not among them. He did a pretty good job, see US Space Team’s Up Goer Five.
I’m pretty sure I was Revell’s best customer for space craft models. I’m also pretty sure I got brain damage from all the glue I used to put them together
Looks like July 20, 1969 was a Sunday. I am quite sure I was visiting relatives and took a picture of the TV. Now to find the pictures.
When Apollo 13 made a successful return and landed in the Ocean, I finished an early shift at noon. I got in my car and headed for a department store and parked myself in front of the best color TV to watch the splashdown and rescue.
“Unlike the Apollo missions, the Curiosity mission controllers had no control over the landing process. ”
Just a note that Apollo mission control was largely a spectator during the landing. All they could do was monitor systems and send advice. Tis was a 1.25 second time delay on all radio communications.
So if any problem occurred the only the astronauts could respond immediately. So if nasa saw anything critical the human delay plus the 2 second delay would make it difficult to do anything helpful.
Just to get video of the launch from the moon required mission control to to send commands to the video camera on rover before the launch occurred
For Americans, reaching the moon provided uplift and respite from the Vietnam War, from strife in the Middle East, from the startling news just a few days earlier (July 18, 1969) that a young woman had drowned in a car driven off a wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick Island by Sen. Edward Kennedy. The landing occurred as organizers were gearing up for Woodstock, the legendary three-day rock festival on a farm in the Catskills of New York.
From Ric Werme’s article, ” if you’re bent out of shape over the lack of stars in the moon photos, include proof that you photograph stars successfully”
Hehe, one thing that is pretty amazing is how good our eyes naturally are at adapting to different light levels, so the unsophisticated conspiracy theorists just assume that still cameras and video cameras will do the same, I guess! If I am looking at a full moon at night here on earth, I can look off to the side just a little ways, and my eyes will pick out stars pretty quickly. Try that with a camera, just try getting the moon and stars in the same shot without the bright moon “burning a hole” in your exposure! Mostly, with short exposure times, cameras aren’t going to pick up the stars at all, no reason to see them in astronaut videos.
A very good friend of mine (now deceased) ran the real time data collection for the wind tunnel which was used to design the chutes for the Apollo program capsule. He wrote the interrupt driven code in Fortran and I believe it ran on an IBM 360, which was another first. He later went on and wrote one of the LISP variants.
I was 9 years old in 1969 , and now vaguely recall watching the event on a 20′ black and white TV. I have but one quibble with what has been written , moon glass could have been created by powerful solar flares , and some claim Giant bolts of lightning . The mission was named Apollo , I believe because the moon has been a source of inspiration for music, poetry and prophecy , as had Apollo , and in later poetry , associated with the Sun . I know it sounds conspiratorial , but the only reasons I can think of for not having returned to the moon ( even if an unmanned probe , perhaps it has happened ), is they found what they were looking for, and terrified of it’s implications,and wishing to not create mass hysteria , thought it best to leave dead dogs lying , or, perhaps it was, to some small but significant degree , a hoax . Or perhaps something else. Additional up close photographs , and video of the lunar surface as viewed on the Apollo missions , have not occurred .Not to mention additional investigations and analysis of the non uniform lunar surface . Ostensibly , given the Martian missions , we’ve had the capability to do so for years . What’s on the dark side of the moon ? Does not the moon have mysteries worth pursuing which , imprints of past events leading to a better understanding of our history , and place in this Universe? I am very SUSPICIOUS .
You are also very mistaken. While no people have returned to the moon, China is interested in do so and recently landed a rover on the lunar farside, See WUWT post https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/05/16/chinese-lunar-rover-may-have-identified-mantle-exposure/ it relays information to Earth via a satellite they previously placed in orbit. It was their second attempt with a lander, the first failed, see https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/12/its-dead-jim-chinas-lunar-rover-fails-to-reconnect-with-earth/
You also seem to have missed the hi-res photos David Middleton posted above from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, WUWT has covered that too, see https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/12/man-made-warming-on-the-moon/
Worst of all, you seem to have not read my warning above:
I was serious about making it good. You appear to have made no effort to learn what has happened in the post-Apollo Era and have posted pure speculation that you did not and cannot back up.
When you reply to this, I’ll delete the thread.
I wish someone could explain me these, please:
– The astronauts spent many days inside a “thermos bottle” in direct sunlight (200 degC) and the only way to cool down was to radiate the heat away. How did they do it?
– In an early phase of the Apollo project it was calculated that the wall of the capsule needed to have a mass of 1000 kg per m2 to avoid damage to the human life from the Van Allen belt radiation. Finally they used only a thin aluminium wall and some aluminium foil in the space suits. Extremely risky, in my opinion.
– How do you steer/stabilize/control the capsule in a vacuum? If the pilot sits on his seat and inclines to the left on his buttocks (eg. in order to release a fart inside his space suit) the center of the mass of the whole capsule changes and the steering thrust may cause an uncontrolled spin that sends the vessel into a crashing course to the moon or an eternal course towards the stars. In Youtube there is a video of Armstrong trying to test drive a space module on earth one year before the launch but he crashed it even it should have been easier to maneuver in an atmosphere.
– You cannot leave a footprint with clear edges on the moon surface because there is no humidity. Try going to the beach and leave a sharp footprint on a hot dry sand.
…And there are at least two hundred more details that don’t fit the official narrative. You can easily find investigative videos on this subject on the web, the problem is that they are normally done by people supporting the flat earth hypothesis which scares the sane people away. However, the above mentioned questions are still valid to me and I have tried to keep an open mind.
Pasi, you must lead a very dull life. I’m reminded of: 1) A bee can’t fly; and 2) Galileo, on his deathbed: “But it moves.”
The moon landings happened. All the imaginative questions can’t change those facts.
I don’t have the time or patience to nuke all of these right now…
Firstly, the astronauts who traveled to the Moon and back were exposed to high levels of radiation. The radiation exposure subsequently led to an elevated level of heart disease in the lunar astronauts relative to who flew only orbital missions.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/heart-health/deep-space-radiation-caused-heart-problems-apollo-astronauts-n618116
However, the aluminum skin and instrumentation inside the Command Module provided adequate protection because their trajectory took them through the weakest parts of the Van Allen Belts and their velocity allowed them to transit the zone quickly.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/SMIII_Problem7.pdf
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– You cannot leave a footprint with clear edges on the moon surface because there is no humidity. Try going to the beach and leave a sharp footprint on a hot dry sand.
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Sand is the wrong grain size. Try this: spread flour over your floor to about two inches thick. Then remove all the air in the room. Now try walking across the floor and see how sharp the footprint edges are.
Jim
Mr. Layman here. (In other words, I’m no expert.)
200*C? That’s about 400*F. When I was a kid (when the landings happened) my parents oven had a “Broil” feature. It got hot. Even when it wasn’t on broil it could go over 500*F. I’m not sure what kind of insulation it had or how much it cost but our house did not burn down.
(PS The Sun only shown on one side at a time. I don’t know if they did it or not but simply rotating the capsule would dissipated the heat.)
Radiation? Guess they learned more after those early guesstimates.
How much effect world shifting their weight have on the capsule when they are weightless?
The surface of the Moon is not made of beach sand. At work I’ve had occasion to walk across fine powders. My footprints left clear edges that remained with clear edges a week or so later. (Unless someone swept the area.)
Again, I’m no expert but these are a few possible answers/things to ponder in response.
Why can’t you answer the questions yourself? I learned long ago that often leads to better questions, better learning, and better knowledge in the long run.
Light doesn’t have a temperature. Of course, sunlight can heat the surface of a spacecraft, energy use inside the craft has to be dumped too. I’m sure you recall that the space shuttle bay doors were opened soon after reaching orbit as they were cooling radiators. You may not recall that the Apollo Command module did spin (slowly) to reduce the temperature differential. See https://www.quora.com/Did-the-Command-Service-Modules-spin-on-the-Apollo-lunar-missions-or-were-they-mostly-continuously-stable-and-not-spinning for some details. It was well described in print and TV in the Apollo Era.
Keep in mind that both angular momentum and angular momentum is conserved. The two main control schemes are attitude control thrusters and gyroscopes. Gyroscopes can be powered by PV panels more or less indefinitely. Thrusters use reaction mass, so you really don’t want to use them. They are good in asymmetric environments where solar wind is spinning up the satellite and the gyros have to spin faster and faster.
There’s really very little an astronaut can do inside a space craft to change course. He can change the craft’s orientation, but not its rate of spin.
And how many have you researched? Do you photograph stars successfully?
Mr. Werme and others: First of all, I want to express my tremendous respect for this blog and all the very talented persons that contribute to it based on more than 10 years I have been following it. I know this is not the forum to debate these conspiracy theories and it gets me easily banned but I just wanted to leave this for the record.
For me, the moon landing belongs to the same category as 9/11: Fire in the Twin Towers makes steel structure, glass, office furniture, toilet seats etc. turn into powder, pancakes Building 7 and creates a crater through Building 6. *It Just Doesn’t Make Sense*. I am convinced that with Trump we are going to see great development in catching the real criminals and also taking down the terribly corrupted NASA, among others.
Temperature: Space is not cold, but it is just a perfect insulator. It is much worse out there than in a car on a parking lot on a sunny day. Rotating the car does not help, it is still bloody (deadly) hot.
Navigation: You do need manual control – in my opinion, all of the time – but latest when the Lunar Module leaves the Moon surface (strangely without leaving a dust cloud and a crater and with a camera man left on the ground following the trajectory) in order to dock with the Command Module 100 km above. Extremely risky / suicide mission.
Radiation: The least risky place to leave the Earth to avoid Van Allen belt is from the poles (did not happen). In any case, as a responsible for the mission, I would have not sent my men exposed to any sudden EMPs from the sun, too risky/suicidal.
Footprints on the surface: I still cannot imagine any physical force responsible for keeping the dust particles attached to each other on the moon. On earth there are water molecules creating a bond between flour or fine sand grains but on the Moon there is no water. It should be all fluffy and volatile! Static electricity comes to my mind but in that case the sand should stick to the sole and leave an imperfect footprint.
A few notes – you won’t accept them, perhaps they’ll get you to experiment.
Temperature: this is related to kinetic energy of atoms moving in a confined space. A vacuum has no atoms. A light beam has no atoms. Space is cold thanks to the 3K background radiation from a very low density gas left over from the Big Bang.. White/reflective objects retard both heat gain from sunlight and heat loss due to black body radiation from the object. That’s one reason why there’s a lot of white and reflective metal on Apollo. And a big life support box on the astronauts’ back. And the space shuttle, and ISS, etc.
Navigation: Spacecraft moving at circular orbit speeds or at escape velocity (41.4%) faster pretty much require computers to get the timing right, especially if you can’t afford to bring a long a lot more fuel. I learned far more about orbital dynamics playing CMU’s version of SpaceWar! than I ever did from books and math, it’s worth finding an emulator or writing one. BTW, one trick I figured out is what’s used for rendevous with the ISS – enter an orbit in the same plane, but with a somewhat lower altitude. An orbit is faster (because gravity is stronger, you need greater speed), and it’s less distance, so you catch up with the ISS, and when you do, it’s fairly easy to rendezvous.
Of course it was risky. So was firing the command module’s rocket to leave lunar orbit. And that had to be done incommunicado with Earth from the far side of the moon due to no relay satellite that could see both the command module and Earth.
The LM made for a launch platform – reaction gases were forced sideways and not much reached the ground, though Aldrin reported the US flag was blown over. The low mass of the LM and low acceleration allowed (demanded!) relatively low thrust and hence reaction mass velocity.
Avoiding the van Allen belt by leaving from the poles means forgoing the 800? mph boost we get from launching at Cape Canaveral (circumference of the Earth divided by the length of the sidereal day times cos(latitude of launch point). It also means burning fuel to make a 90 degree turn, possibly after reaching escape velocity.
I said “make it good” in the post. A lot of orbital mechanics is just high school math and physics and is surprisingly easy to learn if you did okay with “statics and dynamics.” However, you haven’t made it good, you haven’t even tried.
One thing you might not remember to look into in your research is the Skylab space station I mentioned above. It had an area that allowed for much better play with conservation of momenta and kinetic energy than any other space station offered to date. Well, except for the spaceship in 2001 – A Space Odyssey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1sr6aVzW9M – one of the comments says
I never knew that, I’ve long wondered where he learned those moves.
Re: Footprints
Making clear footprints in dry sand may seam difficult. Still, I tried in some filtered and fine dry clay, and to my surprise, the footprint came out pretty clear.
What you should look at is how to brake from 11 km/s after a freefall from 300,000 km, calculate the kinetic energy and see if you can make any physical sense of the numbers and values. They don’t – you should reach some impossible numbers there. No one talks about these basic calculations on how to brake for one or another reason.
Also really peculiar is the fuel calculations. Impossible to find any credible numbers, and the numbers you find are all over the place. Almost as if they have applied Hollywood physics in these operations!
So did we land on the moon or not? Most of us need you all to tell us what to think. Pls help.
[Yes, we landed on the moon and left – six times. – Ric]
Sure we did.
Where do think we got all that “Tang”?
You can’t find it store shelves anymore because we stopped going back. 😎
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2019/07/13/from-massachusetts-moon/QZQCxE9z1aGrCLnL1ni6iL/story.html is a good article about people who worked at MIT/Draper Labs on various Apollo-related projects.
The comments continue with many comments about the companies and parents that worked on the Apollo program.
Thanks Ric. You encouraged me to review the two-body solution again. I understand it more each time I go over it. It’s basically the same sequence used by Newton–although modern vector notation wasn’t known to him. It was amazing that he was able to solve the problem. He even had to invent the laws of motion, the law of gravitation, integral and differential calculus, and even the iterative method for solving Kepler’s equation in order to solve the two-body problem.
Jim